‘Parops, what in blazes is going on?’ Nero demanded.
The Ant commander’s face was haunted. ‘The wall’s down.’
‘The what?’
‘The wall’s down,’ and the floor shook as he repeated himself. ‘It’s coming down right now, and the Wasps aren’t far behind.’
And then Parops was charging back upstairs, his loose armour flapping. Even as Totho watched, Salma bolted from his room, heading for the outside, his sword in his hand.
Nero shook his head. ‘I have a bow upstairs in my room,’ he remarked philosophically. ‘I think I shall go and string it.’ He left Totho gaping.
But gaping would solve nothing. Totho stumbled back into his room and wrestled on his leather work-coat: that would serve as armour better than his bare skin would. He had the repeating crossbow that Scuto had given him and he slung on his sword-baldric that had a bag of quarrel magazines hanging from it.
I am no soldier, he inwardly protested. But the Wasps would not care.
Totho blundered out into the hall again.
‘Hey, Beetle-boy? You fighting now?’
It was Skrill. She wore her metal scale vest and her bow and, to his surprise, she looked more frightened than he felt.
‘I suppose,’ he said uncertainly.
She clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I’ll stick right with you then, Beetle-Boy. Whole world’s coming apart at the seams.’
And it was. Another shudder racked Parops’s tower, and Totho pushed his way to the door and flung it open.
Behind him, Skrill uttered something, some awed exclamation, but his ears were so crammed with the sound from outside that he heard not one word.
The wall was down. The wall beside the tower had fallen and was still falling. Totho saw the stones of the lower reaches bulge and stretch like soft cheese, shrugging off the colossal weight of their higher-up brethren, so that to the left and right of the breach whole stretches of wall were bulging inwards or outwards as though pressed either way by a giant’s hand.
There were Ant soldiers running for the gaping breach, each man and woman falling into formation even as they ran, shields before them, locked rim over rim. The stones fell on them as they massed forwards.
There were other soldiers charging the breach from the outside. For a moment Totho could not work it out at all. The shields of the defenders were meeting the same locked rectangles of the attackers, and in the poor light of the moon he could see no difference between them. Ant against Ant, shortswords stabbing over shield-tops, second-rank crossbows shooting, almost close enough to touch, into the faces of the enemy, and all happening in silence: metal noises aplenty but not a cry, not an order yelled on either side. The battle line twisted and swayed over the breach, which widened and widened, dropping further stones that slammed gaps into the ranks of both sides.
The skies were full. He found himself dropping to one knee, a hand up to shield him. The skies were crowded tonight with a host of madmen out for blood. There were Wasp soldiers darting and passing there above, and the spear-wielding savages in their howling hosts. From the rooftops of nearby houses, from the ground and the still-standing wall, Ant crossbows were constantly spitting. As Totho’s wild gaze took in the archers, he saw that most were merely in tunics, others were near naked. They were citizens, off-duty soldiers, the elderly or children no more than thirteen straining to recock their bows by using both hands.
The skies were busy with more than just flying men. Even as Totho watched, a great dark shape cut through a formation of the Wasp light airborne, its powering wings sounding a metal clatter over all the rest. Totho saw the flash of nailbows from within and knew it must be a Tarkesh orthopter. More of the machines flapped, some loosing their weapons against the airborne while others were dropping explosives on attackers beyond the wall.
Beyond the walclass="underline" there were more, then. Totho craned up and saw the trebuchet on Parops’s tower pivoting, leaning at an angle, launching a missile past the section of wall that still held the gate. Then something thundered over it, and there was the flash of incendiaries that briefly silhouetted the siege weapon in sharp detail. Moments later it was on fire, and Totho saw one of its crew drop blazing down onto the soldiers fighting below. He hoped Parops was well clear.
The juddering machine flew on, a great ugly heliopter clinging to the air with its three labouring rotors. It would have been a simple matter to dispatch it with artillery or with the orthopters but the Wasps had given Tark all manner of distractions tonight.
Totho raised his crossbow, but the sky was such a jumble that he could find no sense in it. He fell back against the tower wall, feeling the stones shift against one another. He had never been intended to see this: it was a world the sedate College had no words for.
Cheerwell, he cried in his mind, but no doubt she had already forgotten him in his self-imposed exile.
Skrill crouched beside him, tracking a passing Wasp with her bow and sending the arrow off, a hiss of annoyance already on her lips as she saw her shot fall short. Totho himself could not even manage to shoot, though. The assault on his senses was overwhelming.
He had put his sword into Captain Halrad, all those tendays before, put it right into his back as they had escaped the Sky Without. The first blood he had ever shed and it had been spilled for Che Maker. He had been there, as one of Stenwold’s men, but only for Che.
He had fought in Helleron and then tracked her into the very Empire, stealing into the Governor’s Palace in Myna. He had used this same crossbow to kill Wasps there, and it had been to rescue Che, to bring her safely home.
But in gaining her he found he had lost her. Her heart had been stolen from him. Stolen, because she had barely met the other man, Achaeos, the Moth-kinden deceiver. And in the end, for her sake, he had left to go along with Salma, to go to war.
He knew a great tide of despair that almost eclipsed him, and when it receded he found himself standing, shooting into the soldiers passing overhead, dragging the lever back over and over until the wooden magazine was empty, and then reaching for another from his bag.
Outside the city wall the advancing infantry of the Empire was almost untroubled, as the defenders sent their missiles at the flying corps or at Anadus’s Ant-kinden. Captain Anadus’s men had not been able to press into the breach, for the Tarkesh were holding them at bay, although the carnage on both sides was unspeakable. The very bodies of the dead were now starting to clog the gap. This was the ancient war that the Ant-kinden had always waged upon themselves. Shield rammed against shield, neither side would give an inch.
Drephos’s new engine was almost at the gates, shielded from above by a great curved iron coping. It was a lead-shotter in essence, a siege engine that should launch great powder-charged balls of stone or metal. Drephos, however, had given it a new purpose.
Captain Czerig himself had taken on this duty, along with two of his artificers. The three of them now sheltered under the eaves of the machine’s metal roof, and guided it forwards until it was mere feet away from the gate. Behind them came a mass of Wasp armoured infantry, bristling with spears and desperate to join the fight.
The sound of missiles above them was more persistent now. If the Tarkesh got a siege engine to bear on them it would be over. The Tarkesh had other things to think about, he knew.
The Wasp army had ramming engines, of course, but they traditionally relied on their engines’ power to push through the barriers. Drephos had a better plan, though. Czerig gave the signal and his artificer had the great machine ratchet back, cogs and gears moving the foot-thick arm into place. There was a firepowder charge in the chamber that could have hurled a stone from the Wasp camp all the way over Tark’s walls, but its force would now be concentrated into the three-knuckled metal fist. Czerig did not like Drephos: the man made him shiver to his very core. Nevertheless, there was no denying his skill as an artificer.